Bellur Krishnamachar Sundararaja Iyengar Quotes
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Backbends are not poses meant for expressionism. Backbends are meant to understand the back parts of our bodies. The front body can be seen with the eyes, but the back body can only be felt. That's why I say these are the most advanced postures, where the mind begins to look at the back.
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Love begets courage, moderation creates abundance and humility generates power. Courage without love is brutish. Abundance without moderation leads to over-indulgence and decay. Power without humility breeds arrogance and tyranny.
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Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured.
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The needs of the body are the needs of the divine self, which lives through the body.
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We can wash the skin of our bodies with a bath, but through asana practice we not only purify our blood and cells, we are cleansing the inner body as we practice.
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A yogi's brain extends from the bottom of the foot to the top of his head
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If you have the right mind, your body can do anything.
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Yoga has a threefold impact on health. It keeps healthy people healthy, it inhibits the development of diseases, and it aids recovery from ill health.
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Intellectuals tend to be arrogant. Intelligence, like money, is a good servant but a bad master. When practicing pranayama, the yogi [makes] himself humble and without pride in his intellectual attainments.
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Learning is as much an art as teaching
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Is it necessary to practice all these asanas, further and further? Is it necessary to develop scientific researches further and further? To a yogi, the body is a laboratory, a field of experiments and perpetual researches.
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If you practice yoga every day with perseverance, you will be able to face the turmoil of life with steadiness and maturity.
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Keep your attention internal, not external, not worrying about what others see, but what the Self sees.
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As long as you do not live totally in the body, you do not live totally in the Self.
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Abhyasa (practice) is a dedicated, unswerving, constant, and vigilant search into a chosen subject pursued against all odds in the face of repeated failures, for indefinitely long periods of time.
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Love begets courage, moderation creates abundance and humility generates power
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When you cannot hold the body still, you cannot hold the brain still. If you do not know the silence of the body, you cannot understand the silence of the mind. Action and silence have to go together. If there is action, there must also be silence. If there is silence, there can be conscious action and not just motion.
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I don’t bring yesterday’s poses to today’s practice. I know yesterday’s poses, but when I practice today I become a beginner. I don’t want yesterday’s experience. I want to see what new understanding may come in addition to what I felt up to now.
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Not all practitioners can jump to that highest level. They have to climb, step by step from the physical sphere to reach the spiritual sphere. If it is treated as exercise it is not the fault of yoga but of the practitioners.
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As we shave it happens that we cut ourself with the razor blade; this does not mean that we must not shave in the morning any longer. It is the same thing for yoga.
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Happy is the man who knows how to distinguish the real from the unreal, the eternal from the transient and the good from the pleasant by his discrimination and wisdom.
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Savasana is being without was, being without will be. It is being without anyone who is.
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We are creatures that are designed for continual challenge. We must grow or we begin to die....So just standing still isn't really an option. We have to move on. If not, disturbances will come.
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Nothing can be forced, receptivity is everything.